Poetry

You are recently dead, old man,     with your thunderous brows and voice like a vast sea     hinting at a dangerous undertow— you are gone, your generation     of testimony, of witness, gone, gone among the ancient rites     of passage, gone, taking with you the innumerable     names of the lost. And yet…

1 Tell me how the prison broke you. The first night, they played with a man in the next cell. Nine rollers scrunched in the tiny stall, hardly room to swing a fist—sometimes one elbowed another and apologized— the inmate wailed absentmindedly, just a voice, and I listened. I thought: I’d see you again. I’d…

This is the way I describe it; what time does to hands and face.                      That old-timer shoots a glance that makes like God in Genesis, you— a very image and withered likeness.               Or a finger points, mocking the way hands dislocate dates, memories, who’s died, what voices issue from one-way traffic—souls like a…

It was Wednesday, I remember. Maybe it was Thursday. I had arrived early, early enough to drink some good wine alone with a man I thought we all should fear and for a second forgot. Then they arrived. Nothing in me had changed, even after the wine, even after I saw a goat and corpse…

And then, one day, though my mother had sent me upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer opposable, they would not hook into the waistband, they swung, limp—under my underpants was the Y of elastic, its metal teeth gripping the pad, I couldn’t be punished unless I was bare, but I couldn’t be bare…

All summer Papá holds a cigarette out the window of his laser-green Buick, points his lips left to blow the smoke into the mirage of exhaust between rush-hour cars. All summer he listens to La Cubanisima on AM radio exploding with accounts of how Castro took everything we had, how we’d get it back someday….

The sail had been drawn into an albino python hung vertically for the town to witness. The sea too shallow to dock. The boat     its chipped purple belly remained somewhat distant     solitary with only its static reflection. The fishermen swam to shore. Dark-brown sand     their patterned trails to the plaza for rest. One wore a…

June. A white heat. Two schoolgirls with crisp collars tread home on a red road.    Two young boys with crew                                                                                                          cuts yawn in the third tank, blink  from five hours sleep.    Blue dragonflies, girlsweat,    orange dust on Adidases… Green interior. Boysweat.        A twist of knobs and dials. Down the…

Like someone trying to nap in a room with a glaring terrarium God rolls over but before resuming his dream where He’s a lover decked out in a sunbeam, He glances at the blue planet he made, at continents crashing and mountains popping up, at sheets of dirt settling in streams and streams settling in…